Leave it to Hong Kong

Remember my brilliant idea a few posts back?

Well, turns out it’s not such a crazy idea after all. Or a new one.

Converting elbow grease into electricity has a long, odd history. The first telephones, in the 1800s, had hand cranks that generated an electrical signal to alert the operator when one wanted to make a call. Hand-crank flashlights have long been available. So have hand-crank portable radios.

And apparently it’s not very efficient.

If all the exercise machines were in use 10 hours a day for a year, the gym could generate roughly $183 worth of electricity. At that rate, it would take about 82 years to pay off [a] $15,000 investment.

Read the article here.

But I say, if we’re doing it anyway, we might as well use what we can, right? Who’s with me?

4 thoughts on “Leave it to Hong Kong

Add yours

  1. I thought about your post during the Super Bowl. They had stationary bikes that powered like 30 minutes of the broadcast. Pretty nifty!Cheers.

  2. I know we weer going to go in on this whole human power-plant thingy together, but …Nevermind. I’m out. I had no idea it’d be so much work for such a little payoff. Forget it.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: